Review : THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON

Title: The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

Opening page quote:

“Citizens, gather ‘round your loudspeakers, for we bring important updates! In your kitchens, in your offices, on your factory floors — wherever your loudspeaker is located, turn up the volume!”

Another quote (no guarantees it is from page 56):

"Where we are from... [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change."

Summary: Published in 2012, The Orphan Master's Son tells the story of Jun Do, a model citizen of North Korea, who is promoted to higher and higher levels of responsibility due to his cleverness and his devotion to Dear Leader. First he is trained to be a tunnel fighter, learning how to navigate in total darkness. Then he is promoted to be a kidnapper, nabbing people from the beaches of Japan. When he proves his language skills, he is given the role of spy, listening to foreign naval transmissions. Ultimately his language skills find him on a mission to the USA to retrieve something the Dear Leader thinks was stolen from him. When that mission goes awry, he is thrown into prison to starve, freeze, or work to death. His love (crush) for the actress, Sun Moon, causes him to realize that no one is allowed to have their own thoughts or desires in North Korea. Everything belongs to the State and every decisions the citizens make are known.

Review: I'll tell you what, reading The Orphan Master's Son is like riding on a harrowing roller-coaster. Be prepared to hang-on for dear life until the ride is over and then wipe your brow while you try to process what just happened.

Although the book is fiction, Johnson writes in the reader’s guide at the end of his novel, “I have a rationale for every artistic decision I made in the book, but … the shocking aspects in my book are sourced from the real world: the loudspeakers, the gulags, the famine, the kidnappings … I actually had to tone down much of the real darkness of North Korea.” 

Now I know this doesn't sound funny, but in many instances the book is laugh-out-loud funny. As you hear in the opening line of this Pulitzer Prize winner. The story is told from three different perspectives. One is the proclamations made through the loud speaker, which are pervasive around the country and in every home. The second perspective is told in the third-person narration about the protagonist, Jun Do. And the last is a first-person narrative of the interrogator for the State.

The book is simply brilliant, funny, perverse, horrifying, and different. Don and I listened to the audiobook narrated by a cast of four and were delighted, transfixed, and amazed by the story. How could any of this be true? Since few people have actually been to North Korea, and if they do go, they are severely limited in what they can do or observe, Johnson did the majority of his research through interviews and reading personal accounts with people who had managed to escape from the dictatorship. He did visit North Korea but didn't really make any contact with its citizens since it is illegal for them to speak to foreigners. Johnson says about his writing,

Of course, I could only speculate on those lives, filling the voids with research and imagination...Traveling to North Korea filled me with a sense that every person there, from the lowliest laborer to military leaders, had to surrender a rich private life in order to enact one pre-written by the Party. To capture this on the page, I created characters across all levels of society, from the orphan soldier to the Party leaders. And since Kim Jong Il had written the script for all of North Korea, my novel didn't make sense without writing his role as well.

The second quote from the book is both mind-bending and deeply explanatory. Jun Do has accomplished the unthinkable--escape from prison--by taking the place of his imprisoner and simply walking out the front door. But now he must pretend to be who he is not. "The story is more important than the person." If you say you are X, you are X.

“The Orphan Master’s Son performs an unusual form of sorcery, taking a frankly cruel and absurd reality and somehow converting it into a humane and believable fiction. It’s an epic feat of story-telling. It’s thrillingly written, and it's just thrilling period.” —Zadie Smith, Los Angeles Times

Easily one of the top five best books I read in 2023.

-Anne

-Anne